Businesses are growing, and new challenges are rising. On the other hand, there is pressure to reduce costs by automating the tasks. The best solution is to lean on custom applications, but it takes a lot of time and is not affordable for most businesses. But do not make up your final decision about this trend. Here we present you collections of facts and information about the best low code platforms where you can grasp a new level of information about them.

Solving today’s challenges means working smarter, not harder

This ever-changing digital world has new ideas and practices every day, and with increasing demand for IT, businesses are required to take their things to the next level with these innovations. But it takes lots of engineering hours and overwork. Companies are overwhelmed with different software and application requirements and getting hard to fulfil all the software necessities.

This is where low-code or no-code app development comes the saving. The learning curve of low code development tools is modest. Because of this, we see all these trends around no-code development tools for creating data-oriented apps or e-commerce web apps. These more rigid solutions provide a set of blocks to create a package out of it with quite limited customization options. This has both pros and cons. Software engineers can spend most of their time creating business-critical solutions for further automation when it comes to benefits. On the other hand, by entirely relying on these pre-packaged low-code tools, you might not get the results you expect, or run into intractable issues when you need something with more customization or is incapable of scaling-up like as your needs grow.

Picking the right low-code solution is as important to efficiency and future growth as is recognizing that low-code is the smart choice for you to make in the first place.

What is the future of the Low-Code Market?

Business insiders are talking about the future of the low-code market. According to [Gartner], by 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of all application development activity. For instance, most online shops and e-commerce websites are built with low-code development tools. The lower level of technical knowledge required to out together an online commerce solution using low-code techniques has revolutionized e-commerce site creation. Until the arrival of this kind of low-code solution website owners required assistance from web developers with very specific – and expensive – development skills in order to create their online shopping solutions. Now it’s arguable that a business owner possessed of only a modest technical knowledge can create a reliable and relatively secure online shopping destination.

This booming industry will probably generate revenue of more than $185 billion by 2030, climbing from $10 billion in 2019 and envisioned to progress quickly. [GlobeNewswire]

Of course, low-code platforms do not fill up the software developer gap but can make things better by giving flexibility for business owners to start their business online. If you really have a significant user audience, maybe you can create more customized and scalable products with the best development tools like RAD Studio.

What is RAD Studio?

RAD Studio is one of the best developer ecosystems. You can use Delphi and C++ with FireMonkey or VCL frameworks to create cross-platform and native applications for Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and the Web.

With one codebase, you can easily target any of those given platforms. Moreover, with rich and modern GUI development tools, you can create highly visual and responsive user interfaces and connect to any data source without writing one line of code. This gives the low-code development feeling but with better functionality and proven 25+ years of stability if you need more customization.

Why does low-code matter?

The idea of low-code development is to make development much easier for everyone, so with a little bit of knowledge or training, people can make something out of micro-service or blocks given by engineers. This shows that with these tools making and creating impactful things do not require much technical knowledge, which shows how mature the software engineering industry is now. 

These low-code development tools allow software engineers to grind on more complex problems while others focus on the surface layer.

According to research reports, low-code and traditional innovations are projected to be embraced by 75% of businesses within several years. 

What are the advantages of low-Code platforms?

As a result of low-code development, users of all ages have begun to learn about coding, which will help them develop small to large-scale projects.

Low-code solutions have the potential to reduce the development time by %90. This shows that every bit of new building block would make things better and fast. 

Depending on the scope of product types, using low-code tools can help save more money and create unscalable systems.

Low-code creation brings the place of conventional hard coding and helps business owners build their software without the assistance of IT devs -> Fast Time To Market

70% of low-code users who had no experience before using low-code platforms learned in 1 month or less and develop apps with low-code applications in 3 months or less.

There is a lot more to Low-Code Platforms than you may think

Major companies like IBM are building AI-powered automation solutions to handle insurance and financial processes faster and more efficiently than human power. For instance, IBM’s RPA solution can be integrated into your system where time-consuming business processes can be automated by Robotic Process Automation solutions powered by AI. This shows more than what you can do with low-code technologies. So, with RPA solutions, you can quickly accelerate productivity and spend more time on strategic work and less time on repetitive tasks.

Where should you apply Low-Code Development?

If you have experience working with low-code app development services, you know it is meant to automate and mitigate repetitive tasks or integrate several services to enable dynamic functionalities. According to the use case survey, apps that orchestrate business processes and workflows within apps are one of the more suitable areas for useful employment of low-code solutions. These areas include:

• Data Collection Apps/Websites
• Shopping web apps
• E-Commerce – email marketing, automation of repetitive tasks
• Creating user interfaces
• Data visualisation
• Customer service and support
• Sales and customer engagement
• Product initiatives
• Compliance

Some facts about Low-Code industry

Since there is a need for more efficient and powerful low-code tools, hundreds of companies build low-code platforms. By this time, there are more than 220 low-code platforms. These tools are mainly structured as a platform as a service (PaaS).

Most low-code or no-code tools are mainly for e-commerce solutions where you can connect several microservices to get a complete working platform. For instance, if you get an email request, other services get it, save it to the Jira, and create a notification on Slack about the new proposal. Since this requires lots of code, you can make that happen in minutes by utilizing these tools. Moreover, dozens of various solution templates can get you a quick start.

What are the disadvantages of Low-Code tools?

While there are numerous readily apparent pros regarding low-code and no-code solutions, there are several cons or usage counterpoints to consider.

Using a low-code solution would almost result in integration problems regarding not common/general services. This can create critical business issues in the system if that custom integration is the most significant area of functionality in the solution you are trying to develop. But there are development ecosystems like RAD Studio with its set of frameworks and libraries; you can quickly start any application with Low-Code Wizard and make any changes you want with %100 control. Unlike other competing offerings which claim to offer a low-code solution, with RAD Studio the project created contains the full source code which is fully accessible and editable just as if you had written it yourself. Unlike other solutions that code remains on your machine and is accessible without being locked into some kind of cloud with a paywall which snaps shut on your access to the application, and that of your customers, the second your credit card expires, and you miss some kind of monthly rental fee.

Low-Code systems are not always designed for performance. It can have difficulties to add custom code or scalability options. In terms of development time, only it can be effective. But software development tools like Delphi and C++ Builder offer a wide range of productivity options to create any type of application with the highest scalability and stability. 

Privacy and security issues – With low-code, you often do not have leverage over data protection or privacy like you do not have access to the source. That code might not follow best practices, which can create possible instability. 

Top tech companies have realized Low-Code dev tools are a hot subject

Microsoft anticipates that the 500 million apps it expects will be created over the next five years, 450 million will be designed on no-code, low-code platforms. Since top tech companies are fighting over cloud development market share, there could also be a war on the low-code market. For instance, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and Google already offer various tools to automate different workflows.

Additionally, Power Platform, with its set of tools like Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents, are booming in the industry. Besides, demand is increasing for Power Platform developers. So, you can easily spot Microsoft’s Power Platform, one of the fastest-growing and true low-code or no-code development ecosystems. 

What are the challenges of Low-Code Platforms?

Companies with many users still rely on traditional software development because of customizability and flexibility. Approximately 50% of the organisations are still not using or considering low-code platforms. 

According to G2 Business Software and Services Reviews, only 12% of enterprises manage their business processes using low-code tools after buying them. Moreover, as discussed earlier, 25% of organizations are concerned about the scalability of the apps created.

What does the future hold, and what should you do?

Given the cases above, it is clear that these low-code and no-code app development tools are the next big thing. It might need several years to really become a robust tech stack, but as a programmer, I would go with something more stable and with decades of proven stability like RAD Studio.

With RAD Studio, you can build apps 5x faster with one codebase for Windows, Android, iOS, macOS and Linux. The latest version of the RAD Studio provides the latest support for all new platform versions with improved IDE and user experience along with richer compilers, debuggers, and database libraries.

Furthermore, with the RAD Studio Low-Code App Wizard, you can quick start your next native and cross-platform application with simple steps. 

Be sure to check out the latest version of the RAD Studio 11.1 Alexandria to learn more about the features since it gives you both classic and low-code vibes. It is one of the fastest time-to-market options because of its award-winning FMX and VCL frameworks for cross-platform responsive UI development and enterprise-grade database connectivity components.